Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others--first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enorm...ous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one's own interests and desires. Carried to its "perfection," it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A woman spent all Christmas Day in a telephone box without ringing anyone. If someone comes to phone, she leaves the box, then res...umes her place afterwards. No one calls her either, but from a window in the street, someone watched her all day, no doubt since they had nothing better to do. The Christmas syndrome.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The ho...rse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with its ...hard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it--the Bovary syndrome.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A married guy is responsible for everything, no matter what. Women, thanks to their having been oppressed all these years, are bla...meless, free as birds, and all the dirt they do is the result of premenstrual syndrome or postmenstrual stress or menopause or emotional disempowerment by their fathers or low expectations by their teachers or latent unspoken sexual harassment in the workplace, or some other airy excuse. The guy alone is responsible for every day of marriage that is less than marvelous and meaningful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Terrorism is an intolerant reaction to the hypertolerance of our societies, just as rape may be an intolerance of our boundless se...xual tolerance (paradoxically, the number of rapes increases with the degree of sexual liberation). It is second-generation violence--a reaction to the absence of violence. The same is true of the second-generation illnesses (cancer); they are a reaction to the hyperprotection of our bodies. When a woman turns off all signals of pleasure in your arms and leaves you no other solution but a disenchanted rape, no phantasy is of any use. But the same applies when her sexual demand is so great as to leave no room even for the illusion of rape.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It was so hard to pry this door open, and if I mess up I know the people behind me are going to have it that much harder. Because ...then there's living proof. They can sit around and say, "See? It doesn't work." I don't want to be their living proof.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Who decides what is margin and what is text? Who decides where the borders of the homeland run? Absences and silences are potent. ...It is the eloquent margins which frame the official history of the land. As for geography, there are divisions and boundary lines that fissure any state more deeply than the moat it digs around the nationhood. In every country there are gaping holes. People fall through them and disappear. Yet on every side there are also doors to a wider place, a covert geography under sleep where all the waters meet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »